public health

Dr. Allan Rosenfield, the former Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health, and one of the most amazing people I have ever had the honor of meeting, passed away on Saturday. He was 75 and had ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease). It is not an exaggeration to say that Dr. Rosenfield's work has saved and improved more lives and done more to improve reproductive health than anyone else I can think of. Through his work and his tireless advocacy, Dr. Rosenfield has saved hundreds of thousands of lives, primarily women and girls, as he pushed the field of public health, and the world, to focus on preventing maternal mortality and to "put the M back in MCH" (maternal and child health), as his seminal article was titled. He grew the MSPH to the major force it is today, and oversaw the training of thousands of students of public health in his 22-year tenure as Dean. He helped to found my department there, Population and Family Health, and so had a very real role in my life, although I never had the honor of studying with or working for him directly. He was Dean while I was a student there, and in addition to the work of running the school, raising money, researching, advising major foundations, and participating in the boards of every major repro health organization, he was very involved with the student body and eager to attend our events, hear our concerns, and mentor individual students.

Dr. Rosenfield is one of my heroes. I am so sorry we have lost him, and so grateful that I had the opportunity to be inspired by him. My thoughts are with his family and friends, and I hope that the work I do can be just a tiny part of a monument to him.

The final third of Nicolas Kristoff's recent column on gender and the presidential campaign was so awesome and so right on I am just going to quote it entirely:

Politics can make a difference for women. If Mr. Obama wants to show that gender issues are on his radar, he could embrace an issue that no president has ever shown interest in: maternal mortality, the orphan issue of global public health. It’s a disgrace that a woman dies in childbirth once every minute somewhere in the world.

In some African countries, a woman has more than a 1-in-10 lifetime risk of dying in childbirth. If men were dying at such a rate for fathering children, the G-8 would be holding emergency summits.

Yet President Bush has actually proposed an 18 percent cut in 2009 in our aid agency’s negligible spending for maternal and child care abroad. Family planning, which reduces pregnancies and thus also prevents both abortions and maternal deaths, is perennially starved for funds.

What better way to repair America’s standing in the world than a major initiative on behalf of women hemorrhaging to death in remote villages — paid for by, say, two weeks’ spending in Iraq? Working with Britain and Norway, the two global leaders on this issue, we could together save 300,000 women’s lives a year.

That truly would be a noble legacy of this campaign debate about gender and politics.

Let's hope Obama reads this column.

I spent most of last week attending the big conference for my field, the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting. 13,000 people attend this conference (!) and yet I still managed to run into several people I knew, including people I work with, lots of friends from grad school, and most surprisingly, a friend from college that I haven't seen in almost 10 years. (That was pretty cool. I was flipping through the one-inch-thick conference book, and noticed a familiar name, of someone I had gone on my study-abroad program with my junior year. It is not that common a name, so I figured I had to stop by the poster this person was giving and see if it was the person I had known--and it was!)

Anyways, the best thing about the conference was definitely getting to see several of my friends present on their work. It was really neat to hear about what my friends have spent the last year or two working on--not that I didn't know, but it's different to hear about it in a professional presentation than it is to hear about it over drinks. I also presented on a project that I spent most of my time on from last July through March, and it was a great feeling to see all that work paid off into a coherent presentation.

I attended a lot of great presentations and heard about some cutting edge research in public health. One of the best was about some researchers who broke down mortality data (which is currently aggregated at the county level) and reassembled it into electoral district data, and found that....Republican electoral districts have excess mortality. This is exciting because this kind of breakdown forces accountability--voters can hold their representatives directly responsible for getting programs and funding that address their needs. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with the research (which isn't published yet). I also heard about tracking a double e. coli outbreak in Minnesota; genes that effect pheromones being linked to excess mortality (?); reproductive technologies and choice; implementation of mental health screening programs at a state level; and a lot more that's all blurred together in my head. Of course, there were dozens more presentations that I wish I could have seen but unfortunately I haven't figured out how to be in two or more places at once. Overall it was a very exciting, stimulating week, and I came home feeling like I'd squished a semester's worth of grad school into four days.

There was a definite downside to the conference: the food at the Washington DC Convention Center is TERRIBLE. Bring apples and granola bars. How can a public health meeting have no fresh fruit available??